August 25, 2016 AT 5:20 pm

Kylo Ren Lightsaber Mod

Kylo Ren’s lightsaber has a particular look in The Force Awakens — it’s raw and fiery. We’ve shown how others have modified blades with hot glue to capture the effect, and Redditor Salok9755 used silicone gel to transform a FX blade. You should practice this technique with something less expensive before you dive in. Salok9755 explained:

liberal application of $6 clear silicone gel from the plumbing department at home depot. It dries pretty quick, so once the surface was completely covered it was pretty easy to shape by hand. Then 4 VERY thin coats of transparent red model spray paint (2 coats each of 2 colors, alternating). And primer and sealer obviously. Took about 10 days start to finish, but the vast majority of that time was drying/waiting. Maybe about 45 minutes of actual work, and roughly $30 in materials

Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.